SOMETHING very nasty has happened in our church. Last week, I went in to conduct the Friday lunchtime service and discovered that the flag was missing.

This is not just any old flag. It is the Colour of the Stock Exchange Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. The London Stock Exchange itself is in our parish and, as Rector of St Michael's, I am its Chaplain.

The battalion was formed at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and 1,600 members of the Exchange joined up: 400 were killed in action. Their Colour was dedicated and placed in St Michael's and it has hung here proudly through the slump, the Blitz, the whole of the Second World War and, in fact, until one day last week when some malevolent person took it upon himself to tear it down.

Well, it's only a flag! No it isn't. A military Colour stands for a whole body of soldiers, living and dead. After a battle, the Colour is usually placed in the parish church and there it is left to hang, a perpetual memory, until it rots. And, as I said at the start, the Colour was not just stuck up there on its flagpole above the nave: it was first dedicated in a moving religious service in which prayers were said and thanks were given for the soldiers who died to preserve our lives and freedom. Because it was dedicated and consecrated in that way, the Colour is a sacred object. So the person who tore it down and removed it is guilty not merely of theft, but of the far more serious crime of desecration literally, the spoiling of a holy thing.

The question arises of what sort of deranged malefactor would do such a thing? What mind is capable of deciding on such an atrocity? Clearly someone who has absolutely no respect for the lives of brave soldiers now dead, and certainly no regard for the holiness of a church building. Even in the appalling, vandalism-infected, yobbish, iconoclastic times in which we live, the desecration of holy places is a rare event. We leave our church door open for private prayer and for the convenience of those City workers and visitors who just want to step inside for a bit of peace and quiet. And we shall continue to do so, despite the sacrilege which we have suffered.

I said desecration of holy things is a rarity but is it? It seems to me that our national life has lost all idea of the holy. The notion that there are holy places and sacred books and emblems has all but disappeared. Sunday is like every other day of the week and the High Days, such as Christmas and Easter, have been secularised and turned into consumer-fests. Next week it will be Good Friday, the most sacred and terrible day in the Christian calendar. You wouldn't guess it. Shops, offices and factories will be open as usual; and so will the cinemas, theatres, dicos, nightclubs, pubs and strip joints.

Those who perpetrate crimes of desecration, along with those who abandon observance of the fact that there is a holy dimension to life, do not harm others, but themselves also.

l Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.

Published: Tuesday, March 19, 2002